Sterling Care Bel Air

This facility excelled at short-term care, with an A- in this area. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home also earned favorable government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that category, with a B. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple relatively minor dings are not the end of the world.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. When computing our nursing grades, we weigh both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

Our final area is long-term care, in which we awarded this nursing home a C in this category. For patients in need of a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 96.0606 percent of its patients, which is higher than the average nursing home. This place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.